The Swedish telecom manufacturer Ericsson will be hired by Russian mobile operator MTS to ship the necessary equipment and build an LTE network in the Volga, Ural, Siberian, and Southern federal districts, MTS announced in late June. Together, these four districts account for more than half of the country’s territory.
While MTS has not disclosed the amount of the contract, it mentioned that it is going to allocate some $1.2 billion in total to build the LTE network in 2013 and 2014.
By 2014, the company expects to have some 15 Russian regions covered by the new technology.
Ericsson has also built the newly launched LTE network of VimpelCom, another major Russian mobile provider. For the other Russian regions, however, Vimpelcom has contracted three other vendors — Nokia Siemens Networks, Huawei, and ZTE, the Russian industry portal ComNews.ru reported last week.
